Airplane Accident Unlike Any Seen Before -- Engine Failure That Killed 2 Spread Parts Over A Quarter-Mile

PENSACOLA, Fla. - What caused a roaring jet engine to blow apart on takeoff, tear into the passenger cabin and kill a mother and son is not yet known. But investigators are sure of one thing: They've never seen an accident like it.

"This is a totally new phenomenon," National Transportation Safety Board member George Black said yesterday after investigators gathered the shattered pieces that ripped open a Delta Air Lines MD-88 jet fuselage like a tin can.

The front of the engine was ripped off, and a gash about a foot wide and more than four feet long was torn in the side of the plane.

Black said aviation experts, including representatives of the JT8D-219 engine's manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney, were discussing why the 2-inch-thick engine casing didn't prevent the parts from flying.

Black said pilots heard a muffled "bump" that turned out to be the engine's fan disc splitting into two pieces at the hub, one piece a third, the other two-thirds.

One of the pieces was found about 600 feet to the east of the runway. The other was found about a quarter-mile away on an athletic field. Some fan blades were still attached to the pieces, Black said. Other blades were scattered on the runway or lodged in the fuselage.

"No one in this particular room, with an awful lot of maintenance experience, had seen this sort of failure before, not a hub failure," Black said. "We only know it separated. We do not know why."

NBC News reported yesterday that the very same engine had to be removed from a Delta plane in December after the cabin filled with smoke on a flight to Orlando. It was later installed on the jet that was in Saturday's accident.

"The area of failure was part of" the work in December, Black said today on NBC. Asked about a possible link to Saturday's explosion, Black said: "There could be and we're looking into that."

The problem in December was traced to a leaky oil seal.

"We never had that problem again," Delta spokesman Dean Breest said. "From the preliminary reports we have seen . . . anyone who speculates that there's any correlation between the two (incidents) would be misleading at this point."

No warning

The MD-88, bound for Atlanta, was loaded to capacity with 142 passengers and five crew members and was traveling about 70 mph when the breakup occurred, officials said. The pilots screeched the plane to a halt in less than 1,300 feet.

The takeoff was proceeding normally up to that point, Black said.

"There were no alarms, no warnings, no annunciation, no nothing," he said. "The engine was normal right up to the bump."

Pilots told investigators they did not see any birds or foreign objects that could have been sucked into the engine.

In an incident today in Nashville, Tenn., a bird was sucked into an engine of a Southwest Airlines 737, which aborted takeoff. At least two people were injured during the evacuation.

Killed in Saturday's accident were Anita Saxton, 39, and her son, Nolan Saxton, 12, of Scottville, Mich.

Dr. Charles Farmer of the medical examiner's office, who performed autopsies yesterday morning, said the two died immediately of severe head trauma from the engine parts.

He said there was no evidence of smoke inhalation, although smoke permeated the rear of the cabin.

"It was more of an instantaneous thing," he said. "I don't think they felt a thing. At least they didn't feel any pain."

Two of Saxton's other children were injured. Derek Saxton, 15, suffered a small burn. His 9-year-old sister, Spencer, had a long gash on her face and a broken leg.

Steven Hill, 32, of Glendale, Calif., was the most seriously injured of five other passengers taken to hospitals. He underwent surgery for leg and skull fractures Saturday night and was listed in critical condition yesterday.

A chunk of fuselage barely missed David Tourtellotte's 14-month-old daughter, Emma. It hit her car seat.

"All hell broke loose," said Tourtellotte, of Clifton, Va.. "We had blood all over our legs and shoes. I was thinking, `Save my baby, save my wife. I don't want to die.' "

Engine had previous incident

Metallurgists and Navy ballistics experts will be asked to help find the cause of the failure. Flight data recorders have been sent to Washington, D.C., for analysis, and investigators were checking all of the plane's systems and maintenance records.

Delta officials said there was no connection between the accident and deep cost-cutting that has pruned about 12,000 jobs from the Atlanta-based carrier since 1994.

Delta has had four engine-disabling incidents since April, according to NTSB records, The Tampa Tribune reported yesterday.

No one was hurt in any of those cases. Two involved MD-88s, the same model in Saturday's accident.

Earlier Saturday, TWA Flight 114, an MD-80 traveling from Seattle to St. Louis, was forced to make an emergency landing in Omaha powered by a single engine after the second engine failed.

Even though the engines in the Pensacola and Omaha failures were identical, engine maker Pratt & Whitney said the problems that caused them were different.

Mark Sullivan, spokesman for the engine manufacturer, said a sister engine is used on Boeing 727s and early 737-100 and -200 models, but the specific model used on the MD-80 series is not used by Boeing.

Information from the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal and Seattle Times reporter Polly Lane was used in this report.